FEATURES OF THE LEGAL REGULATION OF RELATIONS REGARDING THE ARRANGEMENT OF CHILDREN DEPRIVED OF PARENTAL CARE IN THE ANCIENT ROMAN PERIOD

Abstract

The article is devoted to establishing the peculiarities of the legal settlement of relations with the placement of children deprived of parental care in the ancient Roman period. It has been established that the problem of orphanhood, taking into account its mostly social nature, exists as long as humanity, and, therefore, there were various ways of solving it, which, first of all, were determined by the specifics of the development of one or another historical type of society. The objective need to place children deprived of parental care arose in the period of the family system, and was connected with the emergence of social orphanhood as a phenomenon, which was the result of the transition of the society of that time to the family upbringing model. The initial placement of children whose parents died or abandoned them contained some elements of the functioning of modern family-type children's homes and consisted in taking one or more children to raise for a reward provided by the family. In view of the absence of any differentiation of forms of placement of children deprived of parental care at the time, it can be seen that the institution of adoption at the early stages of human development should not be perceived as one of the modern legally established forms of raising other people's children with clearly defined social and legal features, but as a generalized concept that involved the personification of various ways of raising and protecting orphans. The modern concept of the functioning of a family-type orphanage, as well as any other form of placement of orphans and children deprived of parental care, historically originates from the institution of adoption, the procedural features of which were regulated in detail by the norms of the first Roman legal acts, in particular, Laws of the XII tables. With the birth of Christianity and the unprecedented influence of church canons on the organization of social life, the value of children in society increased significantly. Based on the ideas of humanism and mercy, a system of state support for orphans was launched, the main achievement of which was the establishment of shelters for children deprived of parental care. The activities of such shelters were subsequently regulated in detail in the Justinian Code (Corpus juris civilis). It is noted that with the creation of such shelters, the first historical branching of the institution of orphan care took place: along with adoption, the creation of specialized orphanages received a legal basis. It is concluded that the Byzantine system of children's shelters became an innovative element of orphan care and a successful addition to the traditional care inherited from the ancient world, and the Roman orphanages themselves became the first historical prototype of modern family-type children's homes.